Ivory Tower started work on The Crew over four years ago, waited for tech to catch up

Ageing consoles, holding back innovation again.

Ubisoft unveiled The Crew at this year’s E3, a surprise new title which developers Ivory Tower had secretly been beavering away on for some time.

What we didn’t know when the game was announced was that Ivory Tower have been working on it for over four years, with their vision only hampered by the restraints of technology at the time.

“This game started over four years ago,” said Ivory Tower creative director Julian Gerighty in an interview with Digital Trends. “The game hasn’t changed, its just taken that long to get it working and working as well as we want it to be working.”

“All of the concepts that we have here are concepts that the team has been working on for the last 10 years. The massive open world that’s shared with hundreds of other players? That’s something that the team did for Test Drive Unlimited, which was ahead of its time.”

Unfortunately, Gerighty reveals, it was necessary to wait for console hardware to improve before their vision could be fully realised.

“It happened about a year and a half ago, where we realized we can push this a little bit further, we can push the personalization of the world, the non-procedural nature of the world, a little bit further if we do it on Xbox One and PS4,” said Gerighty. “So our Miami is radically different from our New York, which is normal but it takes a lot of work to get it to that level of quality. And that’s only possible on this next-generation.”